Improving outcomes through procurement of innovation

PiPPi is a community of practice that was born as EU - funded project, as a collaborative effort from some of the biggest universtiy hospitals across Europe, to identify from the demand-side how healthcare professionals and health systems may approach the adoption of procurement of innovation in the effort to obtain innovative solutions for our most compelling challenges in health.

From 2018 to 2022, and adapting this collaboaritve work through a pandemia, the results of the project led to a new consortium to keep this community effort to keep moving forward, where King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust , Vall d'Hebron Barcelona Hospital Campus , Erasmus MC , Karolinska Universitetssjukhuset , Ospedale San Raffaele , Medizinische Universit?t Wien , Consorci de Salut i Social de Catalunya and Agència de Qualitat i Avaluació Sanitàries de Catalunya (AQuAS) have kept the efforts of putting together the elements to keep driving this community forward.

Already during the project, and through the activities design in the project, some of the results allowed a consensus over complex elements regarding how institutions and professionals could benefit from having a community of practice where both the lessons learned and the a sound methodology would be presented, with resources, materials, events and platform, that could facilitate the preparation of journey that would go from a challenge to a project Plan. We called this the PiPPi Unmet Need Journey.

This journey is what every procurment of innovation project needs. It's been the effort and the result from this EU-project. The methodologies and resources as well. But the great quest of any community is to be able to gather a common goal that serves as driver for individuals and institucions to build together a more resilient future.

We are all part of something bigger than ourselves. We are all part of a narrative. And we are all still individuals, doing the best we can to keep moving forward. The map at the top of this article is a multstakholder map of people that may have something to do with procurement of innovation. Maybe it's the first time you hear about this. Maybe you consider it has nothing to do with you, with the work you do, or with your tight agenda. We all have limited time and we should focus on where we use our energy.

The energy that has been placed in this community of practice comes from the coordinated effort from many different professionals, with different expertise, profiles and experience in desingning, managing or being part of projects like this. Procurement of innovation it's something more than just another financial vehicle to fund projects. It's one that the European Comission defines as strategic to generate a traction among the different health systems, countries, communities, to actively work towards a collaborative effort to nail the main challenges of our society.

Demand-driven innovation means that part of the actors in that map up there come together to work together by aligning their views, experience and knowledge around designing the root causes and issues of our unmet needs. By doing so, they need to listen to each other, to understand the different perspectives each one brings into the mix, and to find a way to define that unmet need as a demand. A desire to change the system because the off-the shelf products that the industry provides simple don't meet those needs.

Startups, SME's and even research centers, enablers, at the end economic operators that have value propositions to offer the market with solutions work hard to keep an operation that could survive and to keep providing value. They move kick trying to adapt to the changing circunstances of the markets. And often, their innovations may provide them a cutting edge competitive advange that may provide the desired results of succesful companies. This stakeholders are the complementary side of procurement of innovation. They will provide the innovative solutions to our demand.

And this is where this mechanism acts as way to incentivise the demand side to be able to influence the creation of NEW markets. Thus, procurement of innovation is game changer. It's a mechanism that is built to flip the innovation game, not just on the startup/spinnoff idea of having the idea that will forever change the world, but rather the human intelligence (HI) that is put in the effort of our patients, our citizens, our health providers, our health care systems, and our society as whole, to permeate value into the transformation efforts that sound project plans for PCP/PPI will bring to our society in the form of open, fair, competitive cross-border call for tenders that most audacious of proposals from economic operators comming together in new partnerships will open NEW grounds and markets, in the hoslitic quest for more resilient health and social systems, not just across Europe, but eventually around this common world of ours.

Are you going to miss this?

You are in luck. Tomorrow we are holding the third relauch of the PiPPi CoP, tomorrow at 13:00. Make sure to register! I'll see you then, and I look forward to be a part of this transformation with you.